0

So I was trying to make a white chocolate mousse.

The recipe called for heating up cream, beating egg yolks, then combining the two and thickening over heat.

I must've cooked it too long as the egg seems to have been cooked, it smells like scrambled eggs. The egg has become solid but very small (but a lot) of pieces floating around.

At this 'curdled' stage is it safe to eat? If so is there any dish I can make with it or otherwise make it nicer to eat. Basically it's 8 scrambled egg yolks in two cups of thickened cream. So it's a fair bit which I don't want to just throw away.

Aequitas
  • 663
  • 1
  • 8
  • 21

2 Answers2

4

Did the recipe include a "tempering" step where you add a small stream of the hot liquid to the eggs while beating them, before adding the egg mixture to the hot bowl? If not, it should have - if so, did you actually do that? Many new cooks see something like that and figure it's pointless, so they just dump the eggs in - but it's not pointless. A poor recipe writer might assume that you'd know to do that without explicitly mentioning the step. Either would cause problems.

For something like this, you can actually add the whole of the hot mixture to the eggs, slowly, while beating, and then transfer back to the pot for further cooking.

If refrigerated post-disaster, it should be safe to eat. Add more eggs and have creamy scrambled eggs, or a lumpy omelet.

Ecnerwal
  • 17,550
  • 27
  • 65
  • 1
    See: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/4208/how-do-i-temper-an-egg and https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/56024/chemically-what-happens-when-you-temper-an-egg – Ecnerwal Dec 24 '17 at 17:05
1

Assuming it hasn't been sitting out at room temperature since then it will be safe to eat but not necessarily particularly nice as it's. I'd probably turn it into something savoury with fried onions, potatoes, and peppers, (bacon if you want), tasty cheese, and browned in the oven. This would be rather like a gratin dauphinoise with extra veg.

Adding egg to hot cream would have cooked the egg almost instantly, so perhaps the recipe was badly written and you should have let it cool after cooking the cream for a bit.

Chris H
  • 44,113
  • 2
  • 92
  • 151